Re: A bit off topic.. converting Linux HVM to PV

[Brad Spencer <brad%anduin.eldar.org@localhost>]

   If you installed Linux as an HVM, it's more than likely that your file
   system image includes an MBR and other artifacts like that.  You need to
   adjust your Xen config file.  Use 'xvda' instead of 0x301.

   For instance:

   disk = [ 'file:/path/to/image,xvda,w' ]
   root = "/dev/xvda1 ro"

   As far as I know, Linux will not attempt to look for partitions inside
   /dev/xvda1 if it is supplied as such in the Xen config.

   I have done several HVM to PV installs recently while trying to build a
   Xen image library of different Linux distributions that I intend on
   providing to the public, ala stacklet.

   Sincerely,
   Brian Brombacher
   PlanetUnix Networks


Hello..  thanks...  I realized exactly this and responded off-list but
forgot to CC to port-xen.

I was unaware that using xvda was allowed and ended up using a slightly
different tactic.  I simply used 'dd' to extract the filesystems out of
the original HVM image into separate files and then attached those to the
PV config file.  This ended up using more xvda "drives" in Linux, but
worked fine.

I also had assumed that the xvd devices in Linux would behave like other
disk type devices.  That is, there would be a xvda, xvda1, xvda2, xvdb,
xvdb1, xvdb2, and so on.  It clearly didn't behave that way for me.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad%anduin.eldar.org@localhost - KC8VKS
http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]